This application relates to an apparatus for automatically unloading stacks of sheet material articles from a collator. It relates particularly to a mechanism for pulling stacks of material out of the bins of a collator such as a rotary collator, and for transporting the stack of sheet material articles onto a moving conveyor.
Rotary collators generally include a series of bins which are supported on a rotatable drum. The drum is indexable past a sheet feeding location at which the sheet material articles are fed into the bins in a predetermined order, to form stacks of collated sheet material articles in the bins. Collated sets of sheet material articles are generally removed from the bins at a circumferentially spaced location and they are then deposited into a trough wherein they are jogged and stapled. In the past it has been conventional to unload the stacks of sheet material articles from the collator bins by hand and to manually deposit them in the trough. While automated picker type mechanisms, per se, have been known for picking sheet material articles, an example of one being U.S. Pat. No. 2,940,750, these picker mechanisms have generally been provided in an environment in which they are designed to pick one sheet at a time from a stack of materials.